“My heart garden garden” is a phrase jokingly used amongst my group of friends. It is a literal translation of the Urdu phrase “Dil Bagh Bagh Hona” – the crassness of translation providing us many a laugh. And yet, my heart went garden garden last Sunday, the death anniversary of Hassan Nasir, an iconic figure in the Pakistani Left. The National Students Federation (NSF), the students group of the Left, had put together a great show to commemorate Nasir’s martyrdom. Whisper it now, the NSF is back, at least in Karachi.
Hassan Nasir Day is an annual event in the Left, almost kick-starting nationwide activism that lasts till spring. Such is the influence that Nasir (along with Nazeer Abbasi, a student leader) wields over the Left, even in martyrdom. Nasir’s politics were of course about socialism and anti-imperialism; he was after all the secretary-general of the Communist Party of Pakistan. In the era of two superpowers, it was his practical advances that turned him into a threat significant enough for his silencing to become a necessity. Nasir was arrested in 1960 – incidentally after disregarding party advice, chucked in a tiny cell in Lahore Fort, and brutally tortured to death.
Last Sunday, as I attended what used to be a customary and staid commemoration, filled by narratives of valour of have-beens, and hollow and empty rhetoric, I realised things had changed. This truly is a new NSF, dissociated and hence unburdened by the usually reductive and reactive politics of the Left parties and groups. Their event had attracted about 100 followers, a significant show that prompted Shahram Azhar (of Laal fame) – tuned in to the event from the United States via Skype – to comment that these youngsters were leaders of tomorrow.
The current NSF in Karachi is broadly divided into three units. One of those units operates in the University of Karachi, with a young woman leading the charge. I mention this fact because this is a break from the current practice in Left parties: leadership structures in parties are not as encouraging for women to step forward and take control, while affirmative action is almost non-existent. NSF leaders explained that although women assuming control “just happened naturally”, there were no barriers to women’s entry as had become the norm in the past. There was no need felt by the NSF to create a separate wing for young women, since young men and women acted in the spirit of gender equity. No compartmentalisation, they argued.
The NSF’s reliance on youth is admirable too. With no ideological qiblas, the students themselves are decision makers. It is because of this youth that the event started 15 minutes late owing to some technical glitches at the venue, as opposed to the customary hour or so delay at Left events. Among the staid narratives, it was the youth of the NSF that captured the audience’s imagination with a skit about Hassan Nasir. I was told later on that the skit was prepared by one of the three units, whose primary task is to create and enact street theatre. Such division of labour had been planned and implemented by the NSF-Karachi’s organising committee whose decisions are binding.
Those who started this NSF were in fact members of a communist party, the Communist Mazdoor Kissan Party (CMKP). Some 24 young men had approached the CMKP to seek their support in building the NSF. Some of them were even prepared to join the party proper. The CMKP, however, denied entry to all on the pretext that they were concerned with the quality of the entrant, not the numbers. Only four were let in; of them, only two are politically active today, both members of the NSF-Karachi. They are close to graduating from the NSF now, having completed their journey as students.
But graduating to what, should be the question.
With their model of ensuring no Left parties can ever “control” their group, the NSF-Karachi’s organisational setup mirrors that of Dr Sarwar’s Democratic Students Federation. Despite that, the usual motley crew was all there at the event: a vice-president of a party, trade union leaders, activists. Some were there to check progress, others to network, some to report to party superiors and some elsewhere.
The Left’s historical bond with the NSF is emotional, yet the assumption that the NSF will join or graduate into a wing of any particular party is all too presumptuous. Left parties have shown little capacity to be able to capture the youth’s imagination; the youth’s attraction to Imran Khan is but one phenomenon that explains the Left parties’ seemingly unending slide into redundancy and their failure to attract and even politicise a younger generation.
But there are factors such as party culture, party institutions and camaraderie that help build a party. Those factors are at play in student groups in Lahore as well, with the Progressive Youth Front and NSF trying to create space for themselves. These factors are not yet at play across major parties in Punjab; till complete generational changes take place in parties’ leaderships, political culture will be rooted between personality cults, caste associations, and talk of the glory days of the 1960s and 1970s, and the persecution of the 1980s. The NSF and PYF have grown precisely for their emphasis on the youth, not the converted.
Left parties will also have to re-evaluate their definitions of class, of who forms the vanguard of change, and of what needs to be pled to those they claim to represent. Such questions need to be asked for Left parties to recreate themselves and their image. Only then can they become viable political alternatives for politicized youth. Failure to do so means that relying on “capturing” someone else’s work and effort will remain the modus operandi.
For all of the NSK-Karachi’s success in developing a model, and carrying out genuine grassroots activism, the result is the creation of members politically aware not to be either fickle or trapped in a leader’s cult of personality. But they should now be asking themselves, what next? For those who want to continue their activism, the NSF is a training ground. Values of social justice and equality of opportunity for all are noble; yet, these are political demands and will inevitably be carried forward by a political party.
Whether the NSF forms a party, joins one, or remains dissociated is a decision their committees will have to take. What the NSF currently enjoys over almost all Left parties is a stronger political culture and adherence to their institutions. In eventual calculations, groups with stronger political cultures and institutions will absorb the weak. Not the other way around, as seems to be the calculation of Left parties. This is a new NSF, and this might just be the beginning of a new Left in Pakistan.
The author is a Karachi-based journalist. Connect with him on Twitter @ASYusuf